The Singles Jukebox

That’s a wrap on September! But don’t fear, the wait until we return in October will be short (and… sweet? This sounded better in my head)…

[Video]
[7.47]

Julian Axelrod: Sabrina Carpenter must have been a pro wrestler in another life. How else did she learn how to pivot personas this quickly and effectively? After spending years clawing her way out of the Disney trenches, she’s perfected a puerile pop princess pose at the unholy intersection of Madonna, Mae West and Michael Myers. Upon first listen, “Taste” checks all the newly minted boxes of a Sabrina song: sun-baked synths, big vocals in a small body, and production choices commenting on lyrics commenting on her public persona. Upon second, fifth and tenth listen, you pick up on the inside jokes you missed the first time: the height jokes, the “la la las,” the tone that lands somewhere between sapphic and homicidal. Upon hundredth listen, you remember the ultimate Sabrina Carpenter signifier: Underestimate her at your own risk.
[8]

Katherine St. Asaph: Carpenter releases another Haim-esque conglomeration of pop-rock hits past: Sheryl Crow (sunny clapalongs), Gwen Stefani (safe shiny tude and various vocal intonations, like on “exact”), and frenemy Olivia Rodrigo (subject matter and vibe). On her album, she has better.
[6]

Alfred Soto: I can hear the money: the guitars on “Taste” twang with more color than on any pop single since Olivia Rodrigo’s “Good 4 U.” This time her single entendres eschew the affectedly sultry for the self-aware gadfly. 
[8]

Wayne Weizhen Zhang: A retconned version of “Deja Vu” — wow, that feels like a lifetime ago? — where instead of feeling pain in the boy’s propensity for repetition, you’re content with rubbing in the other girl’s face how you got there first. It pulls off a funny trick: I can marvel at the music video and metanarrative in group chats, and have the clever lyrical conceit stuck in my head, without remembering what it sounds like at all, save for the heavenly “la-la-la-la-la-la”s. It’s actually really difficult to make songs as clever as “Taste” sound so dumb and simple. 
[8]

Ian Mathers: It’s not a problem that the video is more fun than the song, but it does increasingly feel like “Espresso” was a fluke.
[6]

Nortey Dowuona: Toddstradamus called it. For once, he was right, and thank God he was. Also, Julian Bunetta with another hit. Is he a good luck charm?
[8]

Mark Sinker: A strong way to understand pop music in the UK right now is via the medium of sonorous Victorian poetry about ancient classical Rome, in which the forces arrayed against all that is noble can be held off by a courageous few at the head of just one slender bridge: “In yon strait path a thousand / may well be stopped by three!”  In this reading Noel (or Liam) is “Lars Porsena of Clusium” and “False Sextus” is Liam (or Noel, look it doesn’t matter, no one cares); the bridge is of course the Top of the Charts, and the “dauntless three” are Sabina’s singles since “Espresso” in April, right now clustered there, battling away. “The Great House of Tarquin should suffer wrong no more!” Let’s hope it shall, though! Or must the Republic of Pop fall? 
[9]

TA Inskeep: Sharp songwriting — that lyric in the chorus is so smart, so very Heathers — paired with just the right touch on Carpenter’s vocals. I’d normally say “+2 for the superb Death Becomes Her tribute video,” but the song is so good it doesn’t need it. 
[8]

Will Adams: On Short ‘n Sweet, Sabrina Carpenter comes up with a hundred ways to call her lover a fuckin’ dumbass, but on “Taste”, she takes aim at her ex’s rebound. This time, the daggers are dipped in honey; she tells the new girl that she’ll just have to taste her on his lips, but the subtext is that Sabrina kinda hopes she enjoys it. It’s wonderfully bratty (NB: not brat, but bratty), and the gleaming, if slightly generic, pop-rock arrangement helps make it her punchiest single to date.
[7]

Jackie Powell: “Taste” has what’s best about “Please Please Please” and “Espresso” wrapped up in one 2:37 minute song. The melody and rhythm are addictive and combine disco (thanks, Ian Kirkpatrick!), a bit of country twang and “slacker rock,” which I guess is the title given to any song that sounds chill, sunny and easy-breezy. But in classic Sabrina Carpenter fashion, what sounds relaxed and light really isn’t, and the combination of seemingly frivolous surface and deeper lyrical meaning that she has mastered is on full display. Case in point are the laughs that she recorded right after she sings the final line in the bridge, “I’ve been known to share.” With the help of Julia Michaels — another songwriter known for more complex lyrics — Carpenter takes the narrative that Olivia Rodrigo played with on “Obsessed” and alters the conversation, talking directly to the other woman rather than about her. Sure, there’s been a lot of speculation about truly how fruity Carpenter is — the fact that she had women on the walls of her room growing up is a whole other story — but I leave each listen of “Taste” thinking about the mystery behind her intent. Why does she want the other woman to know how truly great she is? Is it platonic? Is it more? That confusion is what makes “Taste” as relatable as it is realistic.
[8]

Jonathan Bradley: I wasn’t sure before, but OK: I’m on board with the Sabrina Carpenter character. She’s a fantastically campy high femme train wreck: neurotic but assertive; condescending but kinda dumb herself; uptight, but doing her best to be flirty. As an introduction to an album and a persona, “I leave quite an impression/five feet to be exact” is an all-timer, up there with “Teenage angst has paid off well/now I’m bored and old” or “Been through the ringer a couple times/I came out callous and cruel.” On “Taste,” Carpenter is sunny and mean, like a great soap opera villain, and she accentuates her ’70s adult-contempo arrangement with some great melodramatic touches: the Greek chorus appending “la-la-la-la-la” to the description of cunnilingus, say, or the sudden appearance of a girl gang to turn “know I was already there” into a shouted accusation. (It tries for the gleeful kitsch of Chappell Roan, but it’s really bratty in an Olivia Rodrigo sense, which is delightfully unbecoming for a 25-year-old.) The theme of possession so intense it takes sensory form, as Britney Spears demonstrated on “Perfume” can be serious emotional territory, but Carpenter is happy to be frivolous with it. It’s fun to be bad, and pop’s Julie Cooper is ready to do her worst.
[8]

Jacob Sujin Kuppermann: Diminishing returns for her schtick continues — this is a sturdier song than “Please Please Please” but Carpenter’s charisma as a writer and interpreter has waned  (the la-la-las behind “makes painting with his tongue” are dire.) She’s a star — there’s nothing here that doesn’t move through her — but heliocentrism does not guarantee success; hacky short jokes and come ons cannot be sustained as a model for pop excellence.
[5]

Taylor Alatorre: Sabrina Carpenter has seen the Google metrics for “sabrina carpenter height,” among other less Jukebox-safe search terms, and begins her album by graciously giving her audience, actual and potential, just what they want. Yet she’s also adept at giving them what they don’t yet know they want, in this case a weather-beaten chunk of the side of late 1980s pop-rock that even Haim are sometimes afraid to touch. Syrupy melodies and “la-la”s are carried by production that’s audaciously lo-fi compared to other Main Pop Girl contenders, or indeed the rest of Short n’ Sweet — guitars that languish in late summer heat, a drum sound straight out of a sweltering practice space. Sebadoh Carpenter this is not, but the demo-like qualities lend an added sense of immediacy and closeness to a performer who knows when the time is right to make oneself seem small. Even when she steals Olivia Rodrigo’s flow on the bridge, it’s not out of ill will but rather the inherent comedy of copying from a song titled “deja vu.” She laughs at pop music jokes in her own music — that’s called meeting the consumer where they are.
[8]

Edward Okulicz: If Katy Perry is fundamentally a nasty girl who occasionally plays sweet, Sabrina Carpenter is probably a sweet vacuum who does bitch cosplay. It doesn’t exactly suit her, but if the mask gives her the confidence to unleash a monster wave of pure smug contempt like this, then more power to her. Whether it’s the pilfered hooks or a few groan worthy lyrics alongside the baths that hit, I welcome a pop star who isn’t afraid to swing for the fences and make you like her at the risk of thinking she’s desperate. Here, she’s the audio equivalent of staring directly into the midday sun, in a good way.
[8]

Dave Moore: This song is, annoyingly, perfect. 
[7]

no blergs » Friday, September 6th, 2024 11:00 pm

Surely someone in the Auntie Anne’s dynasty is also an aspiring musician…

[Video]
[4.80]

Grace Robins-Somerville: It’s getting hard for me to keep track of the bearded Top 40 country singer guys—your Lukes and Zachs and Bryans and such. It wasn’t familiar with either of these artists before hearing this song, so the first thing I thought was that they’re just making up people, and the second was a half-assed attempt to come up with a joke about how Koe Wetzel is a nepo baby because he must be the heir to the Wetzel’s Pretzels fortune. As for Jessie Murph, the fried, spindly baby-voice thing has been unbearable for years. But maybe in a month or two I’ll hear this song on the radio at Cook Out while I’m stoned on a weeknight and be charmed by it, who knows. 
[4]

Katherine St. Asaph: This seemingly innocuous song has produced a serious contender for stupidest beef of the year (and yet somehow not the stupidest beef in Koe Wetzel’s career). Wetzel, a Texan country artist, released a duet with Murph, a TikTok-grown pop artist and Wetzel’s labelmate on Columbia Records. For this, the two artists (but mostly Murph) received an amount of online hate that was startling even by easily offended country music fan standards. Why this song, and not, say, Florida Georgia Line collaborating with Bebe Rexha or Morgan Wallen collaborating with Post Malone or Koe Wetzel collaborating with Diplo and Kodak Black (o what a nexus of awfulness)? These cancellable sins, apparently: the duet wasn’t supposed to be a duet (source: trust me bro), the duet is too pop (you don’t write a song with Amy Allen if you’re not making pop), Murph’s voice is too scratchy (I actually like how she blows “indie girl voice” out into the red), or that old classic, “there’s just something I don’t like about her.” The sheer whininess of it all makes me like this more. Good news for shit people, though: there’s a solo version out. This release, a standard tactic that record labels use to juice their streaming playcounts and pander to radio programmers who’re terrified of pop or rap verses in their rotation, is being taken as a capitulation by the haters and even by the artists. “I don’t have to deal with Koe Wetzel fans calling me a rat anymore,” Murph said. When fans go low, they go high, I guess.
[6]

Nortey Dowuona: amy allen miss challenge – failed
[7]

Ian Mathers: I’m sorry, I’m just too hung up on the way that none of the songwriters here appear to have any idea what “the high road” means, idiomatically. Or if it’s supposed to be ironic/sarcastic, someone forgot to tell the performers.
[3]

Will Adams: I enjoy the joke: dude claims to be taking the high road but is in fact just drowning his sorrows in bourbon. But neither Wetzel nor Murph lean into the humor enough, playing it dead serious and dead boring. There’s really nothing else besides those distracting flat notes.
[5]

Alfred Soto: The rake at my karaoke bar who brings a different young woman every visit loves singing “Drinkin’ Problem” and other solid contemporary country. I can see him singing the male part here, down to the self-effacing manner in which he’ll run his fingers through his wan mullet. “I don’t need a ticket to your shit show” is not a thing the gentlemen he poses as would say, though.
[7]

Jonathan Bradley: Whatever his outlaw inclinations, Koe Wetzel has a whole lotta nothing to say and no good way to say it. I don’t mind country mining alt rock for inspiration, because alt rock has soundtracked the boonies for the past couple decades; there’s no point pretending this is an artificial — or novel — intrusion. But if a country artist is going to sell me Staind crossed with Daughtry, I’d like some narrative, some feeling, something more than weed references to tell me why their particular story is worth heeding. Jessie Murph, to her credit, has some vocal fry and she extracts a lot of personality from that creaky voice. She doesn’t have any more material to work with than Wetzel, so all that personality is left to sit and stew but, for the duration of her verse, “High Road” finds an extra dimension.
[4]

Taylor Alatorre: That watery early 2000s guitar tone as homing beacon for the kind of subterranean post-industrial sickness that can only be properly transcribed at a 6th-grade level — otherwise known as the key signature of Madden NFL 2003 — still has its disciples. Koe Wetzel uses it here only as a garnish, not wanting to disturb his staid country duet in which, surprise, both sides are at fault and the title infrastructure doesn’t actually exist. I wish he had gone with his instincts and let the post-grunge infection spread a little more, at least to give Jessie Murph a stronger platform for her acidic put-downs.
[5]

Kristen S. Hé: Wetzel’s warm baritone and Murph’s Bhad Bhabie-Taryn Manning squawk: oil and water, but probably more memorable for it?
[4]

Jacob Sujin Kuppermann: Post Malone and Morgan Wallen have more chemistry than this. These two have taken a perfectly good emo revival guitar tone and done some slam poetry bullshit over it, junking the track up with mixed metaphors and remedial melodrama. 
[3]

no blergs » Friday, September 6th, 2024 8:20 pm

And single of ours…

[Video]
[7.45]

Julian Axelrod: You never know when you’ll hear the song that changes your life. It could come from a DJ, or an algorithm, or a girl group lifer who you could have sworn was the third most famous member of Fifth Harmony but was actually the first or second most notable member of Little Mix, depending on who you ask. I had no idea what Jade Thirlwall’s debut single would sound like before I first pressed play, but even if you gave me 1000 guesses, I never would have landed on “Rina Sawayama doing Uffie over a Eurovision sample that curdles into the nastiest dubstep drop since the Obama administration.” This isn’t the first time an X Factor alum has stuffed a solo single with a million disparate elements to keep things interesting; it’s not even the first time it’s happened this year. But the magic of “Angel of My Dreams” is the way it extends that first-listen feeling to listens 2-500. Even though I know the song by heart, each individual section is so strong that I never expect the drop, or the rap verse, or the intro melody reprise at the end. (I didn’t even notice the camera flash sound effects at the 2:07 mark until my third listen!) This could be the start of an all-time pop run, or it could be a fleeting moment of glory. I couldn’t care less: When I’m listening to “Angel of My Dreams,” I just want to live in each moment until it ends, then immediately live them all again.
[10]

Harlan Talib Ockey: Girls Aloud doing nightcore “Bohemian Rhapsody”, except also emotionally brutal. We will watch your solo career with great interest.
[7]

Dave Moore: How do you even write a pop melody like this these days? Nothing borrowed yet nothing new — dozens of refreshes of WhoSampled yields nothing to alleviate my nagging sense that surely I’ve heard it before; my brain refuses to play a rousing game of earworm hunt like with Chappell Roan. It’s a bit of a shame that the whole thing devolves into a K-pop-ish party-by-numbers muddle, but in the end she wins, is not in the bin, etc.
[8]

Kat Stevens: If I don’t win, I’m in the bin. Specifically, the bin on Deptford High Street opposite Perfect Fried Chicken.
[8]

Iain Mew: Some of the joy “Angel of My Dreams” has brought is that it’s 80% of the way to being a maximalist Rina Sawayama song, and yet is also a persistent enough UK hit to have re-entered the top ten in its fourth week. The range of possibilities looks newly widened. Jade brings some specific things to make it her own triumph too. It’s not just leading off with something so ambitious and inventive, but that she is able to wear it so lightly and naturally, Harry Styles-style. It’s even more impressive to do so with a song that appears to dig into bitter personal experience, centred around repetitions of IT’S NOT FAIR so resonant as to move from sulk to deep truth. 
[9]

Nortey Dowuona: Jade Thirlwall apparently sees the chance to etch her name into stone, rather than make a safe, easy pitch that might simply be forgotten or regarded as nice. But there are many songs about the cruel and unusual punishment of daring to use one’s talent and love to make random weirdos who wear unflattering V-necks a lot of money. Thus Mike Sabath, creator of the world-conquering “Escapism” (and, in a fun little twist, another Jade and Mike Joint as well as the second best Liam Payne song) starts us off with a wilting cry of desperation that has to be walloped by the heavy swing of the chorus, glittery synths sitting atop. The song zips into raspy bass and flimsy and flimsier kick/snare patterns from then on, slowly flattening you until you are nearly crushed. The heavy-handed swing of the first chorus sweeps back in to save you and bind you to it as it disappears, Jade’s firm, fluttery soprano left hanging out on the ledge. It’s almost as if JADE, unlike RAYE, is not begging to be set free — she’s begging to be let in.
[6]

Jonathan Bradley: Cycling through three different song concepts in the first 35 seconds suggests not so much a desire to “do something crazy” as a struggle to hit on anything melodically memorable. It turns out that the slowed-down bass-heavy breakdown works, as does the twinkling fairy dance augmenting the chorus, but a lot of this mistakes attitude for tune — the sort of B-grade effort that made Little Mix only intermittently worthwhile. See, for instance, Jade stretching out  “feels li-yi-yi-yi-yi-ke” and “spoli-yi-yi-yi-yi-ight” for no real purpose beyond filling time before the next switch up.
[4]

Taylor Alatorre: The lack of concern for the cleanliness of the transitions make this feel like a promising storyboard in search of a director, or least someone to step in and say that a desire to be seen as daring and boundary-pushing does not equate to such, and can in fact expose the whole gambit. Most listeners should walk away with a favored segment to return to — mine is the chrome-polished, push-to-start recitation of the title phrase — but a quarterlife retrospective like this should feel more internally cohesive than a sitcom clip show.
[5]

Ian Mathers: The classic “pick your battles. pick… pick fewer battles than that. put some battles back. that’s too many” tumblr post, now in song form!
[7]

Mark Sinker: The idea was like a will o’the wisp or Capt.Fawcett’s Lost City of Z, a gleam, a flicker, a dangerous promise glimpsed across a clearing and through the trees — and it was something like this (it was always hard to explain clearly). A manufactured alt-pop girlie gang, perfectly designed to win reality TV competitions because also able to fashion the drama of their rise — and their internal ebbs and flows — into quilted chart-prog rap-adjacent concept EPs and singles-length mini-musicals, like the Hamilton of the Sugababes. It’s there, always beckoning, just out of reach — and the acts that pass through the glamour of it are always great, of course, very great, but they also always dissipate too fast, before they really land on the absolute thing itself. Perhaps that’s the point; perhaps that’s my doom. 
[9]

Katherine St. Asaph: I am banned from time machines now because I abused my time-travel privileges to do frivolous shit, like posting this song to the Popjustice forums in 2007 and measuring the blast radius of Xenomaniac rapture.
[9]

5 blergs » Friday, September 6th, 2024 6:23 pm

First Sabrina, now Shawn… we just need one more a triple-repeated title song to get a trend piece going…

[Video]
[4.40]

Iain Mew: Shawn aims soft and tries to bring out the anguish and cyclical hopelessness in small moments. The musical stomp has other ideas, stomping out subtlety without bringing anything worth replacing it with. The resultant sense of aimless momentum leaves it sounding like a festival EDM track with all of its drops missing.
[3]

Jeffrey Brister: On the one hand, it is a dated stomp-clap folk single with gang vocals and a hefty dollop reverb in the chorus; with nary a strummed guitar figure or slide flourish or mandolin accent out of place. On the other hand, this sounds really REALLY good. The worst thing I could say about this song is that it’s unmemorable, and it will fade into the swirling morass of competent-if-not-incredible folk songs that sit at the bottom of my mind, and will eventually get it confused with something else years later. But in this moment? Hey, pretty good.
[6]

Nortey Dowuona: Mike Sabath can apparently work magic. I mean, he can lay down some firm, surprisingly sturdy but unambitious drums that allow Chris Thile on mandolin, Kevin Barry on lap steel guitar, Eddie Barry on guitar, Shawn himself on guitar with Scott Harris on background vocals to fill up the mix with all the angst and unalloyed joy that come with finding one’s footing after years of grasping around in the dark for your parents to protect you, for your lover to return to you, for the small, imaginary bundle who you’re convinced is crying out for you to hold them. Then you remember they’re not imaginary. You wonder why you thought that. Then you get up and hold your infant son until you fall asleep instead. Mike then has to worry about maybe lowering the bass to let the lap steel sound better but makes sure to not disturb you or the baby.
[8]

Michael Hong: The comparisons to Man of the Woods have been unavoidable, but “Isn’t That Enough” sounds closer to the alt-country of Waxahatchee than anything by Justin Timberlake. Pleasant enough if a bit repetitive, but as “Why Why Why” attempts to kick up the dust into something anthemic, it sounds more like a deflated version of Avicii’s “Wake Me Up.” 
[3]

Jacob Sujin Kuppermann: A perfect choice for listeners who found Benson Boone and Noah Kahan to be too aggressive.
[2]

Grace Robins-Somerville: Sexless Ed Sheeran-ass Zoloft-ass fake deep pop music.
[2]

Ian Mathers: Is it weird that this feels post-Iron & Wine to me? Something to do with the guitar tone and how it and the vocals are layered. It’s pleasant enough, and the idea of post-teen pop Sam Beam makes me smile. Congratulations, you’ve justified your existence for another day!
[6]

Taylor Alatorre: An emulsified soup of folky signifiers, “Why Why Why” achieves pathos of a sort — not from the feelings described within it, but from the singer’s need to transmute those feelings into rustic coffeehouse wallpaper. The once and future teen idol is mandated after a certain age to reveal more of himself, his true self, but only within well-defined limits: no to Big Star’s Third, yes to “Garden Party.” Or “Story of My Life,” if we’re being realistic here. The big reveal of “Why Why Why,” that of deferred fatherhood, is given its requisite four bars in the limelight, then is quickly blotted out by the oncoming rush of billowy acoustic chords and twangy guitar stabs. This may be for the better, given Mendes’s earnest belief in the mind-blowing lyrical power of the father-mother juxtaposition. Best to let the sound engineers do the real talking here; that coiled spring of rapid-fire strumming that sews up the aforementioned verse has replay value of its own.
[5]

Jonathan Bradley: The best thing about this fibrous Shawn Mendes strum is how it inadvertently demonstrates the talent someone like Ed Sheeran or Noah Kahan has. They could make “Why Why Why,” and a lot of time they functionally do. And that would sell, and people who want earnest and modestly rousing folk songs, which are a perfectly reasonable thing to want — 12 years later, I’m still willing to defend “Ho Hey” — would be pleased to cue it up on their playlists. But it takes skill to create an “A Team” or a “Stick Season,” the versions of this sound that involve more craft and finesse than necessary. I don’t think Mendes is capable of elevating his compositions to that level, but hey, at least he’s capable of not sinking them to Lewis Capaldi depths.
[4]

Katherine St. Asaph: Javiera Mena isn’t supposed to sound like the Lumineers, but Shawn Mendes isn’t not. The sound of basking blissfully in low expectations.
[5]

no blergs » Thursday, September 5th, 2024 11:24 pm

On tonight’s episode of Cheaters…

[Video]
[5.91]

Julian Axelrod: While everyone’s been up in arms over Ice Spice’s shit-centric lyrical fixations, Central Cee’s gotten away with rehashing the same cheating scandal on not one, not two, but three different songs — because nothing shuts down infidelity rumors like constantly bringing them up unprompted. Luckily I’m online enough to know about the love triangle drama surrounding the song, but not online enough to care. So I’m happy to turn off my moral compass and enjoy this for what it is: a cross-Atlantic celebration of mutual toxicity over a Jersey club concoction that’s busy enough to hold the frame, but somber enough to simulate human remorse. This sounds like a big-budget redux of Ice’s early curio “No Clarity” with cleaner production, clearer emotional stakes, and ironically, a less expensive vocal sample, which keeps butting in like a jilted ex demanding their side of the story be heard.
[6]

Grace Robins-Somerville: Apparently there’s some alleged love-triangle/cheating-type drama involving these two that I can’t be bothered to care about because I’m over 23 years old and have a job. It’s funny that Ice Spice is leading the crusade on the “just the tip” movement. Someone’s gotta do it, I guess.
[6]

Holly Boson: Cench was hip-hop’s most vulnerable wife guy a minute ago, sobbing in songs about his girl not wanting to cuddle after sex or not being able to understand she’s perfect at her current weight (and, of course, comparing her to his homosexual gun). The tabloid-dating scandal his team engineered for publicity might have blown up in his face, but as a cheater he’s still got that blokey bathetic Britishness, drawing attention to how his own verse is going to land him in hot water as he raps it in a Pythonesque fascination with his own medium. Poop princess Ice Spice has her success attributed to her looks too often — I think her male haters can tell the dissociated flows and ironic ahegao affectations are “fuck you” rather than “fuck me” and get scared. The beat sounds like a scratched CD of a PSX racing game put in your CD player: one of the first big hits that tries to sound like the music of Y2K and actually does.
[7]

Jacob Sujin Kuppermann: Somehow, Riot’s beat here makes a song about cheating-as-extremely-goofy-mutually-assured-destruction into a cyberspace reverie, a blissed out garble of sounds (the gunshots sound carnivalesque) and textures. Central Cee works better here as a feature than as a lead; playing comic relief to Ice Spice should be tough work, but pairing her genuine grievance with his schmendrick routine fits just right.
[8]

Katherine St. Asaph: Good propulsion, good albeit lite Jersey club, terrible life advice (but at least it’s honest about that, which puts it ahead of many songs).
[7]

Iain Mew: “If he cheating I’m doing him worse” initially reads as farce. Then Central Cee lays it all out in detail too thoughtlessly honest to even be self-serving. By the time their mutual destruction has left the song as just the word “understand” broken and echoing into space, it’s tragedy. 
[8]

Mark Sinker: This song starts well, but I’m really not growing to love Central Cee at any level; he’s just so charmless. Memo to all duelling Bad Girls: get better taste! 
[4]

Jonathan Bradley: I struggle to find a way into Ice Spice’s Y2K!, though it’s just 20 minutes long. Once an impish presence at single length, over even a short album her unvarying flow makes itself too apparent, and her terse quips revolve too much around her being a “baddie” whose man calls her “poopie.” In that context, “Did It First” stands out because Central Cee’s voice is a novel intrusion into the one-dimensionality and the beat’s Jersey club kaleidoscope of cut-up vowels provides breathing room. Alone, however, the song reflects the album’s problems in miniature: too little happening and all of it too familiar.
[5]

Nortey Dowuona: I’m doing Riot and Lily dirty/Nico did it first
[3]

Ian Mathers: This song is nowhere good enough to make up for the hour I spent watching and reading things trying to figure out why all the YouTube comments are like that. I was hoping to have enough context to comment intelligently, but instead I just got one hour closer to death.
[4]

Taylor Alatorre: The plaintively sped-up vocal sample seems to be animated by the same shrouded heartache that stalked the “Boy’s a Liar” remix, except here the masking is less overt and the lyrical front is even more coldly transactional. By cleanly separating the song’s dual emotional channels into words and music, a proper balance is attained between these polarities of hard and soft, letting the listener either hone in on or ignore the dissonance if they just want to vibe out to a sprightly anti-anti-cheating anthem. Any recorded regrets come not from Ice Spice but from Central Cee, who treats this like the stateside stardom test that it is. He regrets getting caught, Ice explicitly wants to get caught, NY drill and UK drill can swap clothes without anybody noticing: lessons in chemistry.
[7]

no blergs » Thursday, September 5th, 2024 8:35 pm

“The album cover features frontman Ronnie Radke’s mugshot after being arrested for domestic assault in 2012.” well okay then!

[Video]
[3.00]

Ian Mathers: Oh, I hate everything about this.
[0]

Jacob Sujin Kuppermann: “It’s just not right what they do to you at that publication” – my husband, upon hearing this song
[0]

Harlan Talib Ockey: I could easily spend a thousand words picking apart this song, but to limit it to its most egregious sins: Radke’s fake Southern accent is offensively poor. The mix is glassy and hyper-compressed. The lyrics are beyond hope. “I may have drew blood / But that was true love”? Is this Falling In Reverse’s idea of clever country wordplay? Meanwhile, Jelly Roll sounds deeply uncomfortable, like he’s straining to be heard. The “wee-hoo” is musically unnecessary and, more subjectively, feels like getting hit in the face with a large glob of spit. If I didn’t know better, I would think this was a mean-spirited parody of both genres. 
[0]

Iain Mew: Bro-country and nu-metal make for an excellent match, with sensibilities and sonics at just the right closeness to blend and contrast as needed. Identifying the semi-novelty singalong of “Heaven is a Halfpipe” as modeling the tone to bridge the two is even smarter. Hopefully someone will pick up those ideas and apply them to something with a chorus that isn’t simultaneously underwhelming and grating.
[5]

Jonathan Bradley: I’m sorry guys, we’re not currently accepting applications for a new “Gives You Hell.”
[2]

Will Adams: I have a relatively high tolerance for nu-metal that’s been polished within an inch of its life, but the choices made here suggest Ronnie Radke is as much of a troll musically as he is in real life. I could take the “to-gether, GETHURR, GETHUURRRR,” but the “wii-OOOH” was a bridge too far.
[4]

Nortey Dowuona: Jeris Johnson, pop singer/songwriter; Cory Quistad, rock singer/songwriter/guitarist who rips a crazy solo; Tyler Smith aka MYTH, singer/songwriter/producer; Charles Kallaghan Massabo, producer; Jelly Roll in general. These folks are involved in the production of this song, and I hope that explains the score.
[6]

Taylor Alatorre: Final-scene-of-Malcolm-in-the-Middle-where-it’s-revealed-that-Malcolm-has-to-pay-his-way-through-Harvard-by-working-part-time-as-a-janitor-in-order-to-fulfill-his-mom’s-dream-of-becoming-a-genuinely-populist-President-of-the-United-States-core. One of the guys in Citizen King went on to do mastering work for Madvillainy and Donuts; people can change, though Radke likely hasn’t. He does the necessary job here of making me mostly forget that I’m listening to Ronnie Radke, with a clutch assist from a more harmless kind of rogue. Come for the Jelly Roll, stay for the jiggy juggas.
[6]

Mark Sinker: Larry, Moe and Curly are feuding. They’re jabbing each other in the eye — except then they’ve also banded together to jab YOU in the eye, while capering about. Maybe it’s funny when they do this to each other, but this song does it to you, and never stops. 
[2]

Katherine St. Asaph: Rare Anthony Fantano W; I just wish the song was worse.
[5]

1 blerg » Thursday, September 5th, 2024 8:00 am

Don’t cry! There’s new Javiera Mena to listen to…

[Video]
[6.86]

Alfred Soto: One of TSJ’s Olympians returns with an acoustic lament about a lover who needs to turn off their brain and look at the stars. The bridge is Javiera Mena at her best: a poignant, sinister supplicant.
[7]

Kayla Beardslee: Softer yet more haunting than her usual icy electropop singles, but as with any good Javiera track, I’m left thinking about how the music interlaces with her wistful vocals well after the song has ended. The sentimental and the spooky will inherit the earth. (Or at least the Jukebox — we’ve written Javiera into the site’s will by now, right?)
[7]

Mark Sinker: There’s something funny and sweet about outing yrself as a rigorous goth girlie — loves Siouxsie! loves shoegaze! — this far in, and while the song itself is a gauzily slight vapour, no more, it is entirely plausible that the ageless undead (who don’t have working hearts) would affect to sway a little to some pleasantly beatless bossa nova. Memory is really no longer a matter for precision for a vampire. 
[5]

Ian Mathers: The goth romanticism of vampires really hasn’t been getting a fair shake in pop culture recently, so kudos to Mena for putting it right back in there: “dare to feel that bitter suffering” and all that. And of course it’s that rare example of a sweeping ballad that actually has a pulse. Eternal life just so you can keep crying forever — what a concept!
[9]

Jonathan Bradley: A gentle guitar arpeggio suggests “Volver a Llorar” will be a polite folk exercise, but Javiera Mena remains too interesting an artist for that kind of dignified but dull work. As the track builds, strings bloom like blood seeping into water, while a bed of subtle but thrumming vocal loops hiccup an accompaniment. Still polite, perhaps, but also rather beautiful.
[7]

Katherine St. Asaph: So steep a plunge from her previous heights that it’s almost offensive. Javiera Mena is not supposed to sound like the Lumineers! The strings toward the end almost salvage it; the Porter Robinson vocal pongs do not.
[3]

Nortey Dowuona: Sandra Mihanovich and Celeste Carballo came from very different upbringings but were connected by their brief romance, and their brave duology of albums Somos Mucho Mas Que Dos (We Are Much More Than Two) in 1988 and Mujer Contra Mujer (Woman Against Woman) in 1990. Milhanovich came from a well-to-do family, her uncle a successful composer (she even covered one of his favorite songs as a favor to him), her father a polo pro, her mother a TV anchor for Telenoche, which was broadcast into millions of homes in Argentina and to Celeste Carballo. Her own fascinating story was never drawn up in any English-language sites, except to say she apparently played with Bob Dylan. She also composed for Argentine TV series Dale, Loly! in 1993, then Inn Trouble in 1997, a Christine Rey Joint meant to address the lesbian lifestyle in the United States, neither of which in this time of streaming and piracy can be found, even with subtitles. These two excellent, long-forgotten icons of Argentinian punk/pop as influences influnced this Chilean maestro. This three-minute jotting of feelings was co-produced by Isidro Acevedo, producer for Jukebox visitor, C. Tangana, Sticky M.A. and Ghouljaboy, nestling Mena in neatly arranged violins while girding it with heavy kick programming, flashes of timpani rolls, and long hi-hat hits. A chirping vocal fragment bubbles forth as Mena’s warm soprano leans out of the center of the song. As for what co-writer Pablo Stipicic and Mena herself are saying, I do not know. All I can say is this: Love is complicated, but death is simple.
[10]

no blergs » Thursday, September 5th, 2024 2:15 am

“Asake immerses himself in American culture, transitioning from equestrianism to socializing at a skatepark…“

[Video]
[6.62]

Julian Axelrod: Asake’s made his financial status clear when he named his debut Mr Money with the Vibe (still one of the decade’s best album titles) but “Active” sounds like a young man obtaining an ungodly amount of money and trying to spend it all in one song. The video features a private jet, a marching band and a fleet of horses. The beat interpolates Nigerian rap, New Orleans bounce and threatens to veer into Jock Jams territory. Even the Travis Scott verse feels like a tax write-off proposed by the label’s accountant. The whole thing is so hyper-active (sorry) that it should fold in on itself, but every time Asake pops up on his own track (which isn’t often enough) you can hear the joy in his voice, like he can’t believe the heights he’s reached and isn’t sure he’ll get to stay there. He sounds like a kid in a candy store, but there are less deserving kids and worse candy stores.
[6]

Ian Mathers: Asake is such a winning presence, and that “oh man, I’m active” hook so fun, that it feels like a waste of our limited time when Travis Scott shows up. He’s not bad, just beside the point (or, you know, minus one).
[7]

Alfred Soto: A collaboration that makes sense, “Active” reanimates Travis Scott; he’s an amiable, game presence despite stating he wants his dick sucked like he’s the first one to come up with the order. But Asake’s the star, singing over the quiet wet beats in search of intimacy.
[7]

Taylor Alatorre: I really wish this had fulfilled its initial promise of transplanting the ’90s Jock Jams ethos into 2024 Lagos — it’s even got the title for it! As a demonstration of the breadth and elasticity of the artist’s “fuji vibe,” though, it does what it sets out to do, forcing its American influences, including the N.O. bounce-style vocal chop, to play by Asake’s rules. The choice to bleep out Travis Scott on the wrong words is the kind of dumb joke that works, whose humor stems mostly from the fact that they actually decided to go through with it.
[7]

Jonathan Bradley: Wedging jock jam chords into Afrobeats turns out to be an exercise more interesting than exciting, which is the exact opposite of what jock jams are supposed to be. Wedging Travis Scott into Afrobeats turns out to be exactly as dull as wedging Travis Scott into anything else he’s ever been wedged into. Forget interesting or exciting; I don’t think the man has rapped a quotable bar in his life.
[4]

Katherine St. Asaph: Was Travis Scott necessary? (Evergreen blurb.)
[5]

Nortey Dowuona: Asake got a good verse out of Travis Scott. He is HIM.
[10]

Jacob Sujin Kuppermann: Asake’s first two albums were thrilling —  two concise journeys through the pop internationale, using the vernacular of contemporary afropop to venture into far stranger territory. “Active” instead dives  fully into what musicologists refer to as the jock jam zone; part of me wants to be mad at how crass this is, but an even larger and more powerful part of me thinks this would sound so sick as the backing track for an Anthony Edwards highlight reel.
[7]

no blergs » Wednesday, September 4th, 2024 4:51 pm

It’s up to us now to turn on the bright lights…

[Video]
[5.50]

Jonathan Bradley: Las Vegas, a mish-mash of anachronism and garish mythology. Wandering the Mojave Desert, Oedipus strikes upon the Luxor Casino, outside which stands a 106-foot-high sphinx. The monster threatens to devour our hero unless he answers a riddle. What goes as Simon Le Bon in the morning, Bruce Springsteen at noon, and Meat Loaf at night? Why it’s Brandon Flowers, says Oedipus, and the beast is defeated.
[6]

Alfred Soto: The Killers released an album in 2021. I didn’t know — until I remembered my review. When Brandon Flowers’s got his dick stuck in his pants and he yells about highways of rebel diamonds and imploding mirages he sounds ridiculous and totally himself; when he insists on the midtempo plod and his doggerel is crisply sung he’s another Las Vegas entertainer cracking his voice through “Born to Run.”
[5]

Jeffrey Brister: Yes, I am also familiar with the works of one Bruce Springsteen, and his compatriots, The E Street Band. One of the things that makes his music so good is not just the explosive wall of sound he and his band can generate (“Bright Lights” demonstrates this aspect to a serviceable degree), but also in his lyrics, which convey vivid emotions and a sense of place, history, context. They are specific. They don’t feel like placeholders or shortcuts to emotional resonance or easy references that confuse knowledge with pathos. They blew up the Chicken Man in Philly last night! The screen door slams, Mary’s dress sways like a vision! Adam raised a Cain! This particular point is even more important if you are attempting to mimic his vocal mannerisms and tone. All that does is make people who are familiar with and have a deep love of The Boss want to hear the real thing, which is actually pretty easy, given that Springsteen is experiencing a late-career runner of two good albums in 2019 and 2020. This aping felt cute in 2006, but now it just feels like cover-band-calibre stuff.
[4]

Harlan Talib Ockey: It feels almost unfair to fault the Killers for sounding too much like Springsteen, since they’ve released countless Springsteen pastiches over the years, but this one is unusually shallow. While it’s a competent Springsteen impression, it’s unclear what the Killers have added to make this song worth listening to rather than, say, actual Springsteen. The lyrics are a half-formed scenario that seems to be missing a narrative, a plot twist, or a point. Incidentally, though, they describe a rock star retreating to familiar territory.
[4]

Nortey Dowuona: Sheree Brown got one hit around 1981 that apparently Brandon Flowers heard on his way back from the hospital, thus her turning up to turn out this very good Meat Loaf hit in the bridge. Worth it. 
[8]

Ian Mathers: You just know Brandon Flowers did one of these when he realized just how many manly men would get faraway looks in their eyes at “there are things I would change but it ain’t worth going through,” and I say that with tremendous affection for him and this song. America’s greatest Vegas band has only become more endearing as Flowers continues to animorph into a Springsteen/Elvis hybrid; ramping up the sonic bombast to match (those backing singers!) is a smart move. This is not at all what I thought the Killers would one day sound like when I was blasting the synth hook of “Smile Like You Mean It” at max volume back in the day. But damn it, for a minute there when Flowers insists that he thinks it’s gonna be awright tonight, he makes me believe that he’s right.
[10]

Taylor Alatorre: A [6] if I close my eyes and imagine I’m hearing the Gaslight Anthem at their most fame-hungry and least Catholic-coded; [4] once I glance at the cover art and implode the mirage.
[4]

Mark Sinker: The specifics, basically, of space opera: it didn’t have to real to be evocative and to connect, and outside a narrow span of New Jersey streets you likely had no idea what Springsteen meant, or if it even meant anything. “Fuelie heads and a hurst on the floor,” or whatever the hell it was: this fine and silly Tolkien street-gibberish that could lock you deep into what was very often — for you if not for Bruce — the purest pretend. Wrapped in goofy palatial grandeur, it was just fun and funny to say, and that was such a beginning. I don’t want to begrudge The Killers looking to centre their version of the same trick around Las Vegas — there’s entertainment in the idea and the trying, and even in making it more trashy and plastic and see-thru — but I honestly have no idea what it is I’m meant to be locking into here. It feels quarter-finished. 
[4]

Katherine St. Asaph: The Killers, despite what the nostalgia-account-industrial complex reposts at you, are not universally seen as iconic (as my boyfriend pointed out, bemused, after hearing “Mr. Brightside” at a wedding and being moved to nothing). I will summon Killers icon-nostalgia in apropos situations (e.g., post-tweenage headbanging breaking out at a wedding), but it’s borrowed and not strong. So maybe I’m not the most sympathetic listener when I put this on and hear a band that sounds completely washed. The sequins have fallen to the floor, smudged by shoes, glam only in past.
[3]

Scott Mildenhall: You can’t have your soul sucked by AI if you’re already your own malfunctioning LLM. This is actually what now happens when you prompt Brandon Flowers to “play the Brightside song”. And if you’re asking the question, you may well still be happy with the answer, and the next answer, and the one after that. No wiring has ever been harder or more existentially attached. The Killers know that everything is the same, and everything is different — and that that’s where the joy is.
[7]

1 blerg » Wednesday, September 4th, 2024 8:41 am

14 years after “Grenade,” Bruno finally found someone who would do the same…

[Video]
[5.70]

Kayla Beardslee: Hey, when is that Lady Gaga and Bruno Mars collab being released?
[5]

Ian Mathers: Mars and Gaga are both skilled at their craft in a way that often seems like a throwback to an earlier era of the art/industry, taking the biggest swings possible in terms of seeking mass appeal without feeling like they’re compromising or calculated, talented mimics and style chameleons when they want to be. Working together on a big, heartfelt, suitable-for-all-occasions ballad actually feels perfect along those lines. The result is the kind of sturdily good (or “good,” depending on your sensibilities) song that, if it catches you at the right moment in your life, might make you bust out crying.
[7]

Joshua Lu: This collaboration would’ve been unthinkable in 2010; now that their careers have somehow converged, the outcome feels weirdly predictable. The emotional heft, vocal runs, and vague nostalgia are there, even if all it does is fill that “Perfect Duet”-sized hole in pop radio. “Die With a Smile” can’t help but feel underwhelming in the context of their career trajectories — the kind of corny balladry that Bruno’s outgrown and that Gaga mostly uses just to recapture the general public — but it’s impossible to wholly reject when it’s this nicely crafted.
[6]

Grace Robins-Somerville: Most Obamacore song of 2024, hands down. “Die with a Smile” is this very specific meld of the era when you couldn’t go to the supermarket without hearing a Bruno Mars ballad and when Gaga was doing a country pivot (although this is far blander than anything on Joanne). It’s been a while since I’ve heard such blatant Grammy bait.
[3]

Jackie Powell: Entertainment Weekly‘s Joey Nolfi wrote that “Die with a Smile” is a song that recalls “the emotional bravado” of “Shallow,” the Grammy- and Oscar-winning smash from Lady Gaga’s A Star Is Born. He’s correct. “Die With a Smile” thrives upon accented and intentional dynamics while making vague and simple lyrics mean more than it they do on the page. That’s also what made “Shallow” so convincing. The difference on “Die With A Smile” is that Bruno Mars is more Lady Gaga’s equal than Bradley Cooper ever was. Mars has more to sing on a song that has Gaga’s name billed first, but both artists shine without the other having to sacrifice. Gaga’s part, which begins at around a minute and a half until the song’s end, transforms this from a Silk Sonic B-side into something that’s much more memorable, emotionally resonant and cinematic. It’s a song that makes me wish I had someone to sing it to. 
[9]

Katherine St. Asaph: So old-fashioned that YouTube’s preroll ad recommended me Botox, and so definitively a Bruno Mars song that I’m genuinely unsure why the credits are in the order they’re in. It works, albeit in an unexciting way, because Bruno and Gaga have practiced melodrama for years — see “I’d take a bullet straight to my brain” and “not even the Gods above can separate the two of us,” respectively — and have also practiced singing pretty then belting big.
[7]

Jeffrey Brister: When it comes to Bruno Mars, I want immaculately executed genre pastiche, something that sounds like the past but keeps a thrilling modern affect. Gaga, for all of her artsy subversion and slight avant-garde leanings, has just as much of a traditionalist impulse, if not stronger; under the right circumstances, the results can be explosive. That alchemy is present here: two artists synced up and bringing out the best in each other’s performances. There is absolutely nothing new here, but it’s polished and perfectly executed. I’m a mark for that sort of thing.
[7]

Jonathan Bradley: It’s not right to say Bruno Mars is so adept with pastiche that he transcends it; pastiche is his artform, his milieu, the genre that this genre artist seeks to perfect. “Die With a Smile” has two ideas: the first being the familiar terrain of the Bruno Mars ballad, and the second being “What if a Bruno Mars ballad was Jeff Buckley?” Even a few years after the 1994 release of Grace, pop music seemed like it only had room in its past for an artist like Buckley: a soulful and beautiful singer-songwriter who leaned toward rock-god charisma rather than folkish introspection. Mars has Buckley’s swooning fragility as well as his stormy squalls of guitar, but for all that Buckley represented the last of something, he never sounded like he was going over someone else’s territory. That fundamentally does not work for Mars’s attempt to recreate the sound; navigating someone else’s territory is Mars’s entire point. If “Die With a Smile” has a third idea, it’s the addition of Lady Gaga, who is herself no stranger to pastiche (see the Madonna-isms of “Born This Way,” the heartland rock of “You and I,” or the way she slipped effortlessly into the Hollywood prestige turn that was “Shallow”). Here, she delivers only competence, as if she’d been asked to sing backup on a new recording of “When I Was Your Man” and found out at the last moment that the assignment had changed.
[5]

Harlan Talib Ockey: Once you get past the surprise of “Die With a Smile” being a Jeff Buckley impression, it’s remarkably insubstantial. “If the world was ending I’d wanna be next to you” sounds clunky and hyper-literal next to, say, “I’d catch a grenade for you”. At least the harmonies are nice.
[4]

Iain Mew: Bruno Mars’s progression makes it a fruitful idea to go back and invert “Grenade” from a distance. Back then, he took the prospect of death as an opportunity to bitterly prove his unmatched love. Now he meets no less than the end of the world with smooth certainty that it’s a chance for mutual togetherness. Lady Gaga’s way with projecting intensity and sincerity in the most extreme contexts makes her the perfect foil, and for two lines after she comes in, it’s transcendent. Then Mars comes back in, and not only is there not enough space for Gaga to shine, there’s barely any space at all. Maybe the old anxiety hadn’t gone away completely after all.
[7]

Alfred Soto: Bruno Mars hasn’t sounded this convincing a love man in years, if ever. Too convincing: Gaga is a backup singer on her own single. Mars sure would fuck himself if he could.
[5]

Wayne Weizhen Zhang: Someone pointed out recently how absurd it is that Lady Gaga’s Twitter bio is literally advertising for the HBO Chromatica Ball special, Haus Labs cosmetics, Joker: Folie à Deux, and now “Die with a Smile.” That sums up my feelings toward this entry into the Gaga canon: random and indicating a certain directionlessness—or perhaps overdirection?—in her career. She sounds great, and the bridge is perfect TikTok fodder, but she and Bruno Mars sound like they have as much sexual chemistry as brother and sister. 
[4]

TA Inskeep: Mars and Gaga sound nice enough together, but there’s no frisson, no spark; they’re just two famous singers, singing a duet for you to stream and buy. 
[5]

Scott Mildenhall: To the song’s great benefit, the annihilatory proposition is underblown. Instead, its precise lilt is folded and finessed throughout, heading hither and thither without over-accelerating or escalating. It’s a fine balance between ostentation and undulation. There’s minimal vocal chemistry, but the blend is happening elsewhere.
[7]

Hannah Jocelyn: I was with family over the weekend, and my brother asked “who is this??” like it was two stunning new artists on their debut single. Upon learning it was Lady Gaga and Bruno Mars, his excitement dissipated. Only Andrew Watt could make two of pop’s best vocalists sound anonymous (don’t get me started on that weightless drum sound he’s inexplicably made his signature). I can’t tell where Gaga ends and Bruno begins, which is a horrible mental image.
[5]

Taylor Alatorre: The drums treat every other measure like it’s a climax because the entire song, or more precisely its billing, is one undifferentiated climax. Which means no build-up, no peaks or valleys, no memorable grooves or meaningful sense of release. It’s just those two names together on a lighted marquee, a chart-watcher fanfic straight out of 2012, What Could Be measuring short against What Must Be, which in this case is the greatest common denominator of softer-than-talcum piano balladry. At least “Grenade” had cartoon bloodletting on its side, and “Shallow” had the benefit of context. “Die with a Smile” reaches for that old doomsday rhetoric out of sheer reflex, even when the prophesized end is painted in washed-out watercolors, like a dream whose outlines dissipate five seconds after waking. Andrew Watt’s approach to retromania is less playful than the Smeezingtons’ was, but also strangely less reverent, since if you truly revere the music of the past then you don’t try to half-seriously Mandela effect yourself into its hit parade.
[2]

Nortey Dowuona: Bruno Mars and Lady Gaga getting to coast by cornering the market on having both vocal talent and a modicum of charisma — you know, the old-fashioned model — would be frustrating, but at least Watt’s patient hand is keeping this over there next to the white Broadway crowd. Anything but more Bruno funk.
[7]

Mark Sinker: Obviously I want to claim I’m only onboard with Bruno as a project at last thanks to Gaga’s in-video cigarette — casually centred, disgustingly compelling — but I have to admit it’s something entirely more wholesome: the actual topic, the actual melody, the actual delivery! He got me in the end! (Also, I like thinking of him as a little monster. He is a little monster….) 
[8]

Jacob Sujin Kuppermann: Would be a [6] with flipped Mars-Gaga ratio, but even then this would not quite get to the force of melodrama that would allow it to reach exit velocity and escape the great and depressing middle ground of tasteful 20th-century pop pastiche. These two have taken enough stabs at staid, boring pop songs for all occasions that they have become the legacy acts they once aspired toward and collaborated with. Good for them; bad for us.
[4]

Kristen S. Hé: As much as I wish this Venn diagram had produced something more adventurous, it’s arguably harder to write a song like this — one that’ll probably be on radio rotation for decades, and that I’ll never object to hearing in any context. I’ve often found Bruno’s schtick cloying and insincere, but here, I’d believe it even without Gaga’s added star power. Bruno, please stay in this lane forever. (Gaga, please don’t!)
[7]

3 blergs » Wednesday, September 4th, 2024 1:40 am